


Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect

by orphan_account



Series: The Dreams 'Verse [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-27
Updated: 2012-11-27
Packaged: 2017-11-19 17:02:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/575572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It started out as something simple, but then Karkat comes to you in your next dream bubble physically injured, and you kind of lose your shit."</p><p>Companion piece to "If You're Dreaming" and "I've Got Dreams."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect

**Author's Note:**

> Someone on Tumblr prompted: "Kankri taking care of Karkat after he gets injured," and I decided to work it into my "Dreaming" 'verse because I love it so.
> 
> This can be read as the third installment to "If You're Dreaming, Are You Dreaming of Me?" and "I've Got Dreams To Remember."
> 
> Kankri's POV because someone else asked for that as well :)

_“And I am nothing of a builder,_  
 _But here I dreamt I was an architect._  
 _And I built this balustrade_  
 _To keep you home, to keep you safe_  
 _From the outside world.”  
_ —The Decemberists

(♋) _  
_

It started out as something simple.

The first time you saw him, he reminded you so much of a younger you—angry, alone, apathetic—that you felt absolutely _compelled_ to take him under your wing.

Your first conversation went great. Or at least, it did from your perspective. Karkat was in awe of your very first lesson with him, struck speechless by the wisdom of your words, by your intentions, which were _clearly_ to educate him on the terrible world he grew up in. You hoped that with a better understanding of it all, with a desire to study his world, with a desire for knowledge much like your own, Karkat would learn to better cope with everything that he went through and come out on the other side triumphant in his own identity, at home in his own skin and blood.

That’s how you coped through it, with knowledge; they say ‘know your enemy,’ after all. When you got the chance to meet Karkat, you just wanted him to do the same.

You perceived Karkat’s silence and agape mouth throughout your entire first spiel as the total absorption of your social expertise, and you felt proud of your endeavors, felt like all of your platforms were finally going to be put to good use. But apparently there was a miscommunication there, because you soon found out that Karkat mistook your helpful lectures for nagging criticisms. And he pretty much hated them.

All your life you’ve gotten the feeling that people don’t want to listen to you. Whether you’re talking about privilege and troll gender identities, or whether you’re just trying to talk about the weather, people zone you out. They always have. It’s like they're allergic to the sound of your voice.

They’ve always seen you as appear, as a color: red. They’ve always ignored what’s inside of you: your mind. You’ve lost count of how many times you told off and turned down highblood after highblood during your lifetime, each one who wanted to cull you and follow you and give you infuriating, unwanted advances, and they were always so _persistent_ , always _“don’t be like that, lovely,”_ and _“I’m gonna give you what you need”_ and _“you need me to complete you”_ and god damn it, all you wanted them to do was _hear you_ when you said that you needed _no one._

No one.

Realizing that you were seen as some kind of voiceless object by most people was hard, at first, it gave you a tough skin and a cold, arms-length distance from anyone who ever tried to get close to you. (Except for Porrim maybe, but you even pushed her away sometimes, without even realizing it).

So when even Karkat, the one who bears your namesake, wanted nothing to do with the substance you’ve built your life upon, wanted nothing to do with who you are as a person and your beliefs and what you preach on—well, it frustrated you.

There’s nothing more frustrating to you than feeling conflicted with yourself, and you’d thought that maybe since he _was_ you, he would be obliged to accept you. (That maybe he would be the first one in a long time or ever, possibly, that really would).

But more than that, it saddened you when you realized that Karkat didn’t actually like you. Like you said, from the moment you saw him he reminded you of you, and you had this instant desire, greedy and selfish and coddling, to want to protect him from harm, to want to show him that he wasn’t as alone as he thought he was.

You were too overbearing though, too desperate to help and clinging to him that you put him off, just like all those trolls on Beforus had done to you.

It wasn’t your intention. You just cared too much, and too quickly. If you were going to really help him, you had to listen to him. You had to listen to his situation without assuming you knew it. Without assuming that he was just like you.

Sounded simple enough. So the next time he came, you listened.

And he opened up to you on his own.

You only found yourself caring for him more after the fact, wanting so badly to keep on helping him after the fact, but the scary thing about that is that you aren’t very good at caring for others. For one thing, you’ve been dead for several Beforan sweeps, and’ve been interacting with no other signs of life besides your irritating ghost-friends ever since; you’re a bit of a cultural dud and a social wallflower. For another, you’ve never filled a quadrant and have very little concept of having to sacrifice your needs and goals for another out of romantic inclinations, the very basis of caring itself, or so they say. And for another, you were never very good with your people skills when you were alive anyway. You were always naturally unaffectionate and a little awkward and much too inhibited to articulate your _personal_ feelings, no matter how many of them you had in your head and your heart at the time.

Give you a particular issue of social injustice and an hour, and you can spit a seamlessly outlined rant on the matter on the fly. But give you a person you care about and an hour to tell them the _reasons_ that you care, to tell them your emotions and _stuff_ , and you can do nothing but blunder your way through it and act out of sheer nervousness in ways that are probably wildly inappropriate. Probably socially unacceptable. When it comes to your feelings, you, Kankri Vantas, are the antithesis of under-control.

And it’s humiliating.

It started out as something simple, but then Karkat kissed you, and… _oh._

Karkat kissed you and it made you kind of obsessed with him. You don’t know how long you wandered around your afterlife once he vanished from you, analyzing and mulling and trying to crack down his motives for a behavior so brash. You don’t know how long you sat there dumbfounded and frustrated and trying to understand him, trying to understand how it made you _feel_ when he pressed his lips against yours and took your breath away in one fell swoop.

Was this his way of showing that he cared about you, too? Was this some kind of hateful rejection, just a way of getting you to shut up? Was it an act of mindless aggression, of perversion? Was it an act of purpose? Was it Karkat falling in love with the idea of you, like you thought that maybe you were with him?

Was it Karkat just wanting to feel physical comfort? Because that, well—you could kind of understand. Sometimes you wanted it too you know, vow of chastity in place to guard you and all. Sometimes you wanted to feel like you didn’t have to build these walls up so high and protect yourself out of the fear of losing yourself.

You realized that you’d never know his reasoning unless he told you, so you waited and waited and tried not to think about him, tried not to think about the reality that you may have just pushed him away for good, before you even got the chance to tell him how much you’d cared about him since you met.

You could be so foolish and quick to jump to conclusions, that’s why you always tried to hide it. You showed that you cared about others by preaching about the social injustices of an unspecified “them,” an anonymous group of people, a demographic that you yourself may or may not have even been a part of, because showing that you cared about a person you actually _knew_ was so embarrassing and made you come off like a creep—you always fell for them so fast.

And having a big heart always made people think that you were desperate.

So when he came back to you, you did your best to make sure that you still had a chance _without_ actually groveling. You approached him gently, hoping he would open up to you again, and when you realized that he was attracted to you, that he cared and had some kind of feelings towards you after all, you snapped and reacted in one of those wildly inappropriate ways and god _what were you even saying_ when you asked him if he’d ever _masturbated._

But he went for it. You acted on impulse, on a whim, and tried to make him feel comfortable with his body like you could never be with your own, and it worked. You watched him learn from you and whispered mindless words of encouragement and watched him come and the release that you watched him experience was unreal, and you couldn’t believe that you’d taken him there.

But you distanced yourself again after that, or at least you told yourself that you would. It was unbecoming of you to want your dancestor in all of these compromising positions, just so that you could serve him and make him feel worth something and make him grow up body-positive and sexually-operative, unlike you.

You tried not think about him again, tried not to worry about what he was up to and whether he would survive the game and whether he was feeling better about his romance problems and himself.

It started out as something simple, but then Karkat comes to you in your next dream bubble physically injured, and you kind of lose your shit.

“Karkat!” you scold when he shows up. “What the _hell_ did you do to yourself?”

Karkat is bruised dark red and scuffed up and dirty. He has small cuts and incisions on his cheeks, throat, and hands, his black sweater is lose around his neck as if the threading has been yanked at, and the circles under his eyes are noticeably darker.

He looks like he’s in pain and when you draw near, he tenses.

“I lost,” he groans in too-brief explanation, sighing.

You take a deep breath and try not to panic for his safety, try to keep your heart from beating hard and your defensive nature from flaring up.

“Lost _what_?” you ask him.

“What was left of my rapidly deteriorating dignity.”

You stare at him curiously and he shifts his eyes away from you.

You produce a spare cloth from your sylladex as well as the disinfectant you’ve always carried as a precaution, and as you quickly pour the liquid into the little white square in preparation to tend to his wounds, Karkat doesn’t even seem to notice, and continues.

“It was that Dave tool,” Karkat says. You tug on his arm gently as you go to sit down on the floor, and he sits too, begrudgingly. “He challenged me to a strife on the roof and I got my ass handed to me on a platter, with the inscription ‘you’re a worthless douchefuck loser’ engraved in each cheek.”

“Why did he want to strife with you? Was he angry with you?”

“No. He just wanted to push me around and humiliate me because he’s bored and he’s an irritating wriggler…I was the angry one. Stupid,” he name-calls himself.

You’re silent. You carefully roll up one of his shirt sleeves and he hisses, revealing a scraped forearm oozing, pink, with bits of gravel in the wound.

“Is that going to burn me?” he winches when you move to hold his hand and place your cloth over the wound, pulling away from your grip.

“Do you want to get an infection?” you retort.

“News flash, dimwad, I’m already infected,” he argues. “Look at the way my blood dries, you can see it for yourself.”

You sigh in exasperation.

“ _Stop_ blood-shaming yourself, Karkat, we’ve talked about this,” you say. “It’s triggering.”

He grumbles.

“Sorry.”

You press the cloth to his arm and as expected he outbursts in protest.

“OW, FUCK!”

You hold his hand tighter when he tries to pull it out from under your grip.

“Come on, it’s okay, this is only going to help you,” you tell him uselessly.

“Like shit it is, it fucking stings, you’re only making it WORSE!”

He groans and whines a bit more as you clean the dirt from his wound, but once you’re done and you’ve gestured for him to give you the other arm, he’s quieted down and only minorly reacts to the physical pain.

He frowns and tenses as you realize that the scrape he took to the other arm is even worse than the last one. You shake your head as you clean it for him, and he props his chin against his knees and exhales in self-disappointment, watching with his bright yellow eyes while you do your work.

“Is it just your arms?” you ask, glancing up at him. “And your face?”

He blushes a little, and then he quips, “Yeah.”

Once you’re done with his arms, you wet your cloth with more liquid and then gently take his face into your hand. He sighs and actually sort of nuzzles his scratched up cheek into your palm affectionately, closes his eyes and looks more sad than you’ve ever seen him, and for a while you don’t move and you just stare at him, swipe your thumb across his cheek bone as faintly as you can, back and forth, and listen to the way he inhales peacefully at your touch.

You think he’s lovely-looking. You’d meant it when you told him that last time. He doesn’t quite look like you, he’s got stronger bones and sharper angles in his face and thicker skin, and he’s compact and warm all over. His hair is tougher, his horns are wider, his teeth are sharper, and you figure these differences come with being born in another era—he’s made to be a fighter, made with blunt, strong hands and slabs of thin muscle and a growl and a temper. He’s made to be able to bark back and protect himself, and short as he is he looks like he could break your limbs if he really needed to, and yet at the same time there’s something sort of soothing about him, when he’s like this. When he’s letting you be gentle with him and letting himself relax, just for a moment. His eyelashes fan out when his eyes are shut and his skin glows pink at the cusp of his cheekbone and he has defined lips, dry but full, and you brush your thumb over one of them and hear him hum a little bit, as if that feels good and he wants you to know it.

Should you kiss him, you think? You want to, sort of badly, but you realize it might be overstepping. He’d kissed _you_ last time after all, and you wouldn’t want to make him uncomfortable, force an advance on him because of something that you, selfishly, want. Yes, you’ve already seen him naked, and so isn’t kissing like the predecessor to helping him pleasure himself? But that was different, that was in the context of a lesson, strictly to teach him. What would Karkat be learning from you if you kissed him now? What would he be gaining from it?

No, you’re only here to care for him, to clean up his wounds and send him on his way, and he can decide to kiss you and relieve your desperation if he wants to. You guess.

You begin to clean the cuts on his face and his eyes open and he groans in pain, twitching and trying to stay still as you wipe away the blood and dirt and grime from his skin.

“Hey,” he says eventually, low and gruff, eyes downward.

“Yes, Karkat?”

“I didn’t mean to show up here like this. I was so exhausted after my fight that I just knocked out and—didn’t expect to be here. With you. I can’t really control these dream bubble things, they just happen.”

“It’s fine,” you say, and really, it is. You store your cloth and disinfectant back in your sylladex and shift a little closer to your dancestor, carding your hands through his hair and smoothing it out, fingers at his scalp and he closes his eyes again and his lips slightly part and you swear you can see him faintly smile.

“I’m just glad I was able to help you,” you tell him, honestly. “I always will be.”

Somehow, Karkat opens you. As disastrous as your encounters with him have kind of been so far, somehow a single thought, a single stream of your heart, has gotten through to him, and you’ve been able to tell him with clear words.

_I want care about you.  want to help you._ _I want to see you grow._ _I’ll never hurt you._

_Ever._

And when he’s not with you, you wonder if he'll really remember that, and you want him to, so badly. Just before you get that ticking feeling that his dream is about to end, that he’s about to leave your safe, dead little world and be sucked back into the waking moments of his, he leans forward on his knees and cradles your face in his hands and he kisses you, simple and chaste and warm and passionate, and you cradle the back of his head and stroke your hands through the roots of his thick hair, and then it’s over too soon.

He pulls back and you meet his gold eyes for a flash of a second, and then he vanishes in front of you.

You sigh and close your eyes, sitting alone on the floor.

He’ll be back. He’ll be back and you’ll keep getting the chance to show him how to feel.

(♋)

**Author's Note:**

> Don’t worry, this is not where this ends!
> 
> I’m working on a multi chaptered fic based off of this ‘verse because I’ve got plenty more for these two to learn from each other. TBC~


End file.
